Page 238 of Fractured Loyalties

He freezes. His tongue pushes against the air that won’t come. His eyes water.

I release him enough to let his breath scrape back in. He coughs. It turns to a laugh that bleeds on the edges.

“You can’t hold every door, Voss,” he rasps. “You can’t be everywhere. The girl will be hurt somewhere you aren’t.”

I consider that truth. I acknowledge it. Then I break his nose and drive him across the desk. He collapses into the leather chair and it skids into the window with a sound that pleases me.

“Names,” I say.

“Go to hell.”

“I spend my days there,” I say. “You’ll hate the hours.”

He spits blood. “Volker said you’d make this messy. He said—”

I hit him once. Not hard. Enough to end the sentence that matters to me.

“Volker is a dead man walking,” I say. “You’ll not be walking at all if you say his name in this room again.”

His eyes shine with hate. “You think the girl wants you now? Wait until she sees what you do without her in the room. You can pretend you kill for her. You really kill because you like it.”

I smile without my mouth. “Both can be true.”

He lunges for the cabinet. He is not fast. I let him get the drawer open because I learned a long time ago that fear means less when a man thinks he has a chance. The gun clears the wood. My hand closes around the slide. I turn it and put the muzzle against his cheek.

He pants. “Do it.”

I think of Mara standing in my kitchen, holding a baton with hands that shook less each minute. I think of her staring me down and saying she needed me with hate and hunger in the same breath. I think of the envelope of photos in the alley. The text. The Civic in the clinic feed.

I put the gun in the cabinet and close the drawer with his face.

He drops to his knees when the edge clips his temple. I take his wrist, turn the ring until skin gives. I pocket it. The ring doesn’t belong to him. It belonged to a girl who thought he was safety once. I know because I make it my business to know. I grind the ring under my boot, and he makes a sound I’ve heard from dogs that lost half a leg under a car.

“This is the end of your part in it,” I say.

I do not draw it out. I do not speak again. I finish it with the belt from his own trousers. I keep it clean. I make sure he looks like a man who failed to wake. I wipe prints. I pocket the USB that sits under the desk blotter because men like Vale always keep one.

Before I go, I turn his face toward the window. The river looks like a vein. He will not see it again. He never saw it when it mattered.

The elevator gives me back the corridor, and the two men on the dolly are still there. One snores wet onto the concrete. The other moans.

“Leave town,” I tell him. “Tell anyone who asks that Vale moved to the country.”

He nods so hard his cap shifts. I don’t wait for him to stop.

Back in the SUV, I plug Kinley’s phone into a cable. Lydia’s exploit runs the lock like it’s nothing, lines of code peeling back his secrets one by one. The screen wakes, and the messages spill out—thread after thread, his betrayal written plain.

The thread with the relay sits there like a throat I can crush with one thumb.

I type a single line:Union closed. New site needed.

The reply pings at once:Understood. Confirm status of asset.

Asset. They mean me. Or they mean Mara. I test the word.

Asset secure.

Another ping:Hold pattern. Await next window.